May you live in interesting times...

Things have been far more exciting in Wodonga from a court perspective this past week than we really wanted. Especially when we're down one staff member. :P Four days of court, and a lot of the work was stuff that walked in off the street, as it were. Not even the sacred public institution that is Friday was safe - between myriad intervention orders and a bloke in custody for stealing a car, we didn't finish sitting until four-thirty.

It's good to be home. Even better that it's Saturday tomorrow.

The movie with David didn't pan out in the end - a case of bad technology. I think I'm going to have to double check the mobile number he gave me, because I tried calling the damn thing several times that afternoon and kept getting the "not turned on or not in service" message. It was pouring with rain that afternoon any way, not the best for cycling ten kms to Albury. Ah well, better luck next time.

Hmm, there was something else I was going to talk about, but my concentration's crap at the mo'. Need sleep. Or at least downtime. Catch you later.

What is it about bastards?

A warning here, folks, I'm about to do something completely unheard-of in my LJ, at least recently.

I'm going to talk about writing. *grins*

This particular train of thought began tonight watching the TV with BRM - a BBC show called Rebus. Another of those dark-edged crime thriller dramas, with the title character a Scottish police inspector who seems to have been cast directly from the John Constantine mould. He drinks scotch like water, sleeps with the wife of a good mate, gets clonked over the head and punched in the nose, and spends a fair bit of time desperately trying to play catch-up in an invesitgation that is running rings around him. He bends the rules, breaks them when he has to, but somehow justifies it against a personal code. He's cocky, he's clever, and of course, sexy in a I'm-a-bastard-but-a-charming-one kind of way.

It's a character I'm seeing more and more. The flawed hero. The balancing act between good and evil. The Bastard. He's virtually every private detective and hard-arse cop. He's in books, in movies, on TV and in the comics. He's everywhere, and he always gets the chicks.

What is it about this character that we find so endlessly fascinating, be he John Constantine, Pete Wisdom, Jack Hawksmoor, John Rebus, Frank Burnside, Sam Spade? There's the way he's so hard to define, so hard to predict. There's that element of danger, of risk, the sensation of playing with fire. There's that underlying element of vulnerability, the knowledge that under the scruffy clothes and heavy drinking and chain smoking, there lies a fundamentally good man. The sheer contradiction.

For me, it's the complexity of the character. He is at once frustrating and fulfilling to write - he challenges me to extend myself beyond simple cliche, even with his status of Archetype. Writing the Bastard, I can't take shortcuts without it not ringing true, and the character himself is not backwards in telling me when I'm cheating. There's something liberating, too, about writing such a character. He is the id given free rein, doing the things we wish we could do.

*grins* I've been writing Constantine again, can you tell?